Editor’s Note: In The Shuttle, POLITICO’s Daniel Libit offers members of Congress a lift to the airport, train station or bus stop of their choosing. The price of the ride? The tape recorder is running. This week: En route to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Thursday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) talked about AIG, Chuck Grassley’s risqué comments, Dick Cheney’s interview, her interest in the Illinois Senate seat and the catharsis of hanging around the dairy section in the supermarket.

POLITICO: It struck me as interesting that Sen. Grassley made the comment he made about …

Schakowsky: “Sucking on a tit?” You heard that one?

POLITICO: Yes, but I meant the comments about AIG executives committing suicide. And there didn’t seem to be much outrage over that level of comment. What does that say?

Schakowsky: People are very mad about this. They are really mad. I think they feel like nobody is out there ready to catch them when they fall, or give them a special award for being responsible, or help if they lose their job.

POLITICO: What do you think this whole matter has done for President Obama in his first couple of months? Has it created a kind of inertia, stalled him?

Schakowsky: The thing about Barack Obama, I know about him, is he doesn’t get distracted. If you notice during the campaign, things would come up and people would counsel him to change strategy, get tougher, get meaner, do this, do that. That’s not how he is. He is very secure and willing to take responsibility but doesn’t get ruffled.

POLITICO: One of the byproducts of the AIG stuff is the things that it knocked off the front pages of newspapers, including Sen. Roland Burris.

Schakowsky: This is a good thing.

POLITICO: That he got knocked out of the headlines?

Schakowsky: Yes, although I suspect indictments are going to come down pretty soon [for former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich], and this is a soap opera with sort of sporadic episodes, and there may yet be more. Maybe not so much Burris, but Blagojevich will be back.

POLITICO: You told The Hill that you were interested in running in a Senate special election if there was one.

Schakowsky: If there were a special, I would jump right in. I am giving myself to mid-May to really explore the idea of a run in 2010.

POLITICO: I imagine what you’re weighing is whether you want to give up your House seat.

Schakowsky: That’s right. I’m going to do some more polling and we may know better who is in the race, and we’re looking at numbers and what it might cost — what it would take to run a winning primary. I feel confident a Democrat’s going to win.

POLITICO: What about someone like Rep. Mark Kirk, who could swoop in and steal it?

Schakowsky: You know what? I think Illinois wants to see the Obama agenda move, and Kirk and [Rep. Peter] Roskam have voted against pretty much everything. That’s not where Illinois is at, and it’s not as if they hold Democrats responsible for Rod Blagojevich. So it is a matter of a primary. We’re looking at it in a serious way.

POLITICO: Where do you see Sen. Burris, in terms of his relationship with the rest of the delegation? Is he being embraced in any way?

Schakowsky: I don’t see it, although I think some more than others [are embracing him]. Bobby Rush has. But to the extent that the House and Senate have reason to always interact, I think, certainly from my point of view, it is a cool but cordial relationship.

POLITICO: It is my understanding that you were a driving force behind putting expiration dates on food labels.

Schakowsky: This was 1969. I was a very young housewife with two little babies living in the suburbs of Chicago, and a group of women got together. At the time, everything in the grocery was coded and you couldn’t tell how old it was. ... So six of us got together and called ourselves the National Consumers United — modestly.

POLITICO: So I guess you were always going to be a politician someday.

Schakowsky: No. At the time, I thought I was going to be part of this group, but I can’t speak in public. So we developed a very high-tech method of figuring out these codes. We pushed the stock boys against the shelves and made them tell us how to rotate the stuff in the front. And we published a book, an “NCU codebook,” cracking maybe a thousand of these codes. ... That was an incredibly empowering experience. And now [Democrats] have an agenda we can actually move, but for a long time, during the Bush years, the darkest days, I would just hang out in the dairy section of my Jewel and watch people check dates and remind myself that change happens and I can make a difference.

POLITICO: You once signed on to a bill to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney. What have you thought of the couple of public appearances he’s made recently and the comments he’s said of Obama?

Schakowsky: I think what he is proving to everyone now who sees the world a bit differently is just how dark, in fact, those days were. Dark in the way that he’s still defending torture, saying that without those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” without torturing people, the president is putting the country at risk. And nobody buys that anymore, and I think that the more he talks, the more marginalized that view is and the scarier he seems.

POLITICO: President Bush more or less said the other day that he wasn’t going to comment on Obama publicly.

Schakowsky: I think that’s a smart thing for him to do. I think actually, George Bush, except for that one thing where [Obama] couldn’t stay at the Blair House, aside from that little incident, that he was pretty generous and spoke kindly and appropriately.

POLITICO: Will you donate to President Bush’s library then?

Schakowsky: I haven’t received a solicitation. It must have gotten lost in the mail.